Long term detection of water depth changes of coastal wetlands in the Yellow River Delta based on distributed scatterer interferometry

•We present a new DSI method for temporal evolution of water depth in wetlands.•Spatial adaptive filtering was used to reduce noise and enhance fringe visibility.•InSAR derived high resolution water depth images series were generated.•Water depth plays a key role in evaluating ecological performance of wetlands.

Coastal wetland ecosystems are among the most productive yet highly threatened systems in the world, and population growth and increasing economic development have resulted to extremely rapid degradation and loss of coastal wetlands. Spaceborne differential Interferometry SAR has proven a remarkable potential in wetland applications, including water level monitoring in high spatial resolution. However, due to the absence of ground observations for calibration and validation, long term monitoring of water depth, which is essential to evaluate ecosystem health of wetlands, is difficult to be estimated from spaceborne InSAR data. We present a new differential synthetic aperture radar method for temporal evolution of water depth in wetlands. The presented technique is based on distributed scatter interferogram technique in order to provide a spatially dense hydrological observation for coastal wetlands, which are characterized by high temporal decorrelation. This method adapts a strategy by forming optimum interferogram network to get a balance between maximum interferometric information preservation and computational cost reduction, and implements spatial adaptive filtering to reduce noise and enhance fringe visibility on distributed scatterers. Refined InSAR observation is tied to absolute reference frame to generate long term high resolution water level time-series using stage data. We transform water level time-series to long term observation of water depth with assistance of a dense measurement network of water depth. We present water depth time-series obtained using the data acquired from 2007 to 2010 by the ALOS satellite, which supplied significant information to evaluate ecological performance of wetland restoration in the Yellow River Delta.